The Cultural Search Engine

August 7th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Semantic, Verticals | No Comments »

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Enjoying museums from the comfort of your own lazy chair? Roaming the digital depot of your favorite archive? Compiling a collection without having to travel around the world? Or performing scientific research without having to make an appointment with the conservator? It’s possible! Museums and other institutions present our cultural heritage more and more often through websites.

However, there is a big chance that the context of a found digital heritage object is missing. This means you miss out on a lot, like the connection with objects from other museums or archives, stories about their creator, the history of their genesis, and other background information. But this kind of information is very much available. Not just inside the heads of curators and guides but simply in digital form, in other digital databases. The E-Culture project investigates how the interaction with the Dutch cultural heritage can be improved.

The E-Culture project is a cooperation of Digital Heritage Netherlands (DEN), the Institute Collection Netherlands (ICN), the Free University, the University of Amsterdam, and the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI). Together they are looking for methods to interconnect different kinds of information that come from different sources, in order to offer better search and presentation facilities. And they do so with success.

By using semantic web technology, the partners at this cultural worktable find solutions to interconnect information sources in a smart way and build a new infrastructure. New designs of web applications also see the light of day. This resulted in winning the first prize for the ‘Semantic Web challenge’ at the fifth International Conference on Semantic Web Technologies in 2006.

One of the project’s results is the Demonstrator. It enables the user to search for, for example, artworks made by post-impressionist artists, born in Europe before 1850. The search results are displayed in a time line that shows when the found objects were made, what their relation is to the period in which the artists lived, and which related art movements were active during that period.

To be able to offer this information, a first version of a system that combines information from all these sources was developed. Information about images of paintings on the internet can be loaded from an online museum. The system takes information about painters and other artists from another information source. Another source gives information on art movements and the materials used in art. A fourth source supplies information on places, regions, and countries around the world.

Source: MultiMediaN

Search for art for sale with ArtQuest

August 7th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Verticals | No Comments »

AQlogoWhether you’re an artist, collector, consultant, dealer, designer, gallery, publisher or hobbyist extraordinaire the easy-to-use ArtQuest process will facilitate your acquisition or sale. When a work of art strikes your interest, simply click the email address listed with the art and send the member an email. It’s that easy! And please don’t be shy, our ArtQuest members want to hear from you and willingly answer your questions or respond to your comments. Source: ArtQuest.com
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Explore music with the Shazam Music Explorer

August 7th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Music, Unique Interfaces, Verticals | No Comments »

logoMusic Explorer is powered and updated by the real Tagging activities of over 20 million users and provides you with a diversity of tracks or artists you might be interested in, based on the starting point of your journey.

Explorer gives you this as a ‘map’ of related artists, tracks or users based on how many other members have tagged these as well as your original track or artist.

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Source: Shazam

Doceos – the education search engine

August 7th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Verticals | 2 Comments »

logo-doceosintDoceos Education Search Engine is a search engine of courses and centers of formation.

Doceos is born from the necessity to group contents related to the formation and to use the system of consultation of Internet contents more used “search engine”. The use of the search engine allows to accede to the information in a simple way, using words search or phrases that define the information that is desired to look for.

2009-08-07_1332The information is divided in two great groups, the centers of formation and the courses of formation. At the moment Doceos contains in its data base more than 6,000 courses and 19,000 centers of formation. The information search is simple you only have to key in the field search the words or phrase to look for and select where you want to look for, courses or centers of formation and to do click in the search button.

Instantaneously it will appear the information asked for in the form of a listing of centers or courses of formation that agrees with the selected search criteria.

In the listing of centers or courses of formation can find the title of the course or the name of the center, a small description and links that allow us, to contact with the formation center using the telephone, to ask for information using a form of information request and to see with more detail the information asked for.

Also it is possible to sail between the contents being used the categories of information, that they group the information of the courses and information centers in different categories and allow a easy and simple navigation between the contents. Two types of categories exist following if we looked for a center or a course.

The categories of the courses describe the different types from existing courses following the activities that they define to the course: Science, Company and communication,…

The categories of the centers describe if the center is of continuous education, a school of business, university education or a school.

Doceos also has a called section “old students” where it is possible previous registry of user to accede to information of old students of each one of the centers of education.

Source: Doceos

If you wish to obtain more information on Doceos Search Engine please do not doubt in contacting directly with us using the contact form, you will find a link to this form of contact at the end of this page

topikality searches so you don’t have to!

August 7th, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in In Beta, Innovations | No Comments »

2009-08-07_1017Whether you’re an opinion leader or academic, or you just need to stay up to date to earn a living, topikality is the smart little helper you need. Instead of reading dozens of articles to learn the latest in your field, you’ll need only a handful.

Best of all, you’ll know you haven’t missed any of the good stuff. What topikality sends is all you need to read to stay up to date.

topikality learns what topiks you’re into and – just as importantly – what sort of articles you like. Then it delivers only those articles that match your preferences. A handful of them each day.

And it does this very intelligently. Over a couple of days, you vote articles up or down, and it learns precisely what you value, and what you don’t. After about 50 votes, you’ll start to see some real differences in what it delivers. The more you vote, the better it gets. (Yes, you do have to train it a bit in the beginning – about 5 minutes a day. It’s not smart enough to read your mind. Yet… ;-)

Each time you click, topikality’s Statistical Machine Learning technology analyses some 200 of the article’s features, and draws comparisons against previous articles that you liked (and didn’t like) – looking for trends. So unlike a Google Alert, it doesn’t just consider whether you like or dislike the topik subject. It actually considers things like the words and phrases throughout the article.

topikality isn’t about more info. It’s about better info. It’s about staying up to date, without wading through all the irrelevant stuff.

How is topikality different from Google?

Google finds pages that contain the specific phrase you search for. It doesn’t learn. topikality proactively keeps you updated on a topik — not based on a phrase, but based on what you like. Unlike Google, it learns what you like and delivers only those articles.

Isn’t it just a fancy Google Alert?

No. A Google Alerts is simply a notification that Google has found a page that contains a particular word or phrase. topikality is much more than that:

  • It emails you a list of articles relevant to a topik — not just web pages containing a word or phrase.
  • It learns which articles you like and which you don’t.
  • You receive more of what you like, and less of what you don’t.

Here are a few examples showing some real life uses of topikality.

Choosing a new mobile phone

A Blackberry addict wanted to upgrade from his trusty Blackberry Pearl mobile phone. Not sure whether the Blackberry Bold or the Storm was better for business, he set up a topikality topik for each of the phones and monitored the online chatter. It soon became evident the Bold was better for business use, and the Storm was a cool new gadget.

Keep up-to-date with your customers

A professional services company wanted to build better customer relationships by keeping up-to-date with any breaking news about their customers. They set up a topikality topik using their customers’ company and key executive names, and started receiving relevant breaking news about those customers, each day. This helped them focus on their customers’ needs, and their customers loved the pro-active interest in their business.

What’s happening in my profession?

A businesswoman wanted to stay current with trends and happenings in her profession. It was too important to wait ’til the monthly printed journals were published and waiting for the bi-annual conferences was simply out of the question. So she set up a topikality topik using the name of the profession and common phrases, and instantly started receiving a daily list of relevant articles to help her stay on top.

Blogger’s research tool

A prominent blogger is renowned for her broad and cutting edge knowledge. To keep a finger on the pulse and retain her opinion leader status, she uses topikality as a research tool. It delievers highly relevant resource material and ‘food for thought’, with minimal time and effort on her part. So she has more time to focus on blogging and the numerous social media conversations orbiting her blog and domain.

Know your competitors

When a small business was pitching for new work against large competitors, it was important for them to monitor competitor news and activities. Rather than visiting competitor and industry news websites every day, they set up a topikality topik, and instantly started receiving regular updates that helped them remain competitive.

Online Reputation Management

The marketing manager of a mainstream software company was finding it increasingly difficult to monitor news sites and blogs to ‘listen’ to what people are saying about her company and brand. Customer opinion spreads fast, and she wanted to make sure she responded quickly to any negative or misleading mentions. Rather than manually monitoring each site, she set up a topikality topik and drastically reduced her monitoring time each month.

Students researching online for assignments

A Political Science uni student set up a topikality topik to help him find track down the latest news for an assignment. Instead of trawling the Internet for current political articles and sifting out the irrelevant general information, he was able to focus on planning his assignment, while the specific news he was after came directly to him.

Source: topikality.com

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